How do you know if your sales process needs to be re-engineered or if your sales team is performing at its highest level?
The only way to confirm with certainty is through an audit of each step of the process to identify deficiencies and where, if any, the process has any bottlenecks that could be slowing down sales velocity.
Because sales enablement tools have gained a lot of momentum over the past few years, many sales teams are feeling the pressure to restructure their processes. Doing so helps to scale success with faster, larger deals and through greater efficiencies. The caveat is that it’s a daunting, but necessary task and an even bigger lift once marketing teams are injected into the process. Without a restructure, sales teams are left to perform tasks that really should be a shared responsibility with marketing, which eventually slows down pipeline acceleration if not done.
Blueprint has a formula that we use to navigate our clients through this re-engineering process that creates a cross-functional playbook for accelerated growth. We use this approach to create better organizational alignment so that sales teams can focus purely on closing deals and marketing can use demand generation and customer acquisition strategies to fill the pipeline with good prospects.
Old School
In the old way of doing things, sales teams would identify the leads, qualify and prospect them, do the pitching, present the proposal, and ask for the sale. And in the event that marketing generated the leads to hand off to sales, there was still a disconnect with the sales team not having a clear understanding of where on the funnel the leads were qualified prior to the handoff. Some parts of this sales process appeared counterproductive until recently once Account-Based Marketing (ABM), demand generation, and other new conventions gained momentum. Imagine how much manpower that old process required and how much time was spent before getting to the deal.
New School
The formula we use to re-engineer the sales process is to reverse positions and have marketing lead with demand generation, account identification, customer intelligence, and qualifying the prospect well before the sales team starts any type of engagement. It’s a balancing act with marketing being responsible for building brand and communications planning while also playing a role in business development. Yes, marketing should have a result in business development and driving revenue. Otherwise, it’s just a cost center and not a revenue generator.
In this re-engineering formula, we create a separation of duties by separating marketing activities that mainly focus on communications impact – those can still continue without a hitch since that helps to build awareness. What we’re focused on in this process are the marketing activities that have the ability to drive business impact (i.e. sales, revenue growth). Within this process is to also create brand impact because the company needs to drive thought leadership to build authority. As marketing takes the lead, we’re also aligning the tech team to focus on web personalization, predictive content, marketing automation, analytics, and the CRM system.
As a B2B marketing agency, we don’t see this robust process often enough where sales and marketing are intertwined. Typically, marketing lives in one corner and sales in the other corner, which often creates friction between the two teams. The stats say it all – there is a 24% faster growth in revenues when sales and marketing teams align.
We help B2B companies achieve sales velocity and accelerate the pipeline by re-engineering how the sales and marketing teams function. We can audit your entire process and recommend where deficient areas can be improved. Contact us at (305) 741-0378 or by email at hello@blueprintcreativegroup.com to schedule an audit.
